Parent-Child Longing

This morning as my tea steeped, I looked at the two digital clock readouts in the dark kitchen. They caught my attention because they were one minute apart. 6:01, the microwave’s clock declared, while the stove below it stuck with its own read on it: 6:02.

One of my fears about blogging through Lent is that doing so can turn off those who would find my humanistic meanderings more inviting. So I thought I’d change the title of this week’s Good Story (click for a link) from The Prodigal Son to The Parent-Child Longing. The maleness of the characters is not the issue at hand, nor the profligacy of the child, wasting his inheritance. The issue is the unbreakable bond that exists between the parent and the child, a bond that if considered is exhibited at every moment as delight or longing, and is written all over their faces.

I sat yesterday at a table with four beautiful women. Our daughter Amy was over with her daughters Nadia and Sonja, and they were sitting at the table with Kathy and me. The day was all about Making St. Patty’s Day Cookies, with the recipe that Kathy had from her mother. The day was all smiles and laughter as the cold balls of dough came out of the refrigerator, got flattened between waxed paper by rolling pins and then cut and laid out onto cookie sheets and baked and cooled and frosted. Two home-schooled children saved from refined sugar tasted of the forbidden fruit, and approved, and got the buzz. Two mothers watched their daughters and delighted in them. Three daughters blossomed in the love of their mothers.

Earlier in the day, I had sat on the sofa with one beautiful woman. She had awakened in tears. The night before she had struggled with the cookie dough recipe that she had not used for years. She had thought it so familiar. But in the morning she realized that she struggled to remember not her mother’s recipe, but her mother, who had died when she was 11. She could be mother to daughter, but she could not be daughter to mother. She wept tears of longing.  Did I long for my father when I went 300 miles away to college? Did I know that a soon as my car had turned the corner from my mother’s smiling wave that she had buried her face in my dad’s chest and wept? Nope. I was in my world of becoming, of doing-my-thing. The seedling doesn’t grow in the tree; it grows where it was blown. But we are not seedlings or trees, we are parents and children. We are daughters or sons, and sometimes mothers or fathers.

So read the story; come to your senses. Look into the faces.

Clocks had faces, back when they also had hands. We had to look at their faces and make sense of the position and relationship of their hands to understand them. Now we look at digital readouts. 6:01 ... or 6:02. No relationships, no faces, no hands. Maybe that is why the conflicting time displays, one minute apart from each, other struck me this morning. The fraud of their exactness was exposed. In faces we see ambiguity; we recognize our own uncertainty, ambivalence. Things like longing show on faces. We’re drawn in.

Look into faces today. In your Examen tonight, consider how the faces in the story and the faces in your day resonate in your heart, how they drew you in, and what it felt like.




FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.